NAV BASE

The Unbearable Book Club For Unsinkable Girls by Julie Schamer Book Review

I'm Adrienne Haus, survivor of a mother-daughter book club. Most of us didn't want to join. My mother signed me up because I was stuck at home all summer, with my knee in a brace. CeeCee's parents forced her to join after cancelling her Paris trip because she bashed up their car. The members of "The Unbearable Book Club," CeeCee, Jill, Wallis, and I, were all going into eleventh grade A.P. English. But we weren't friends. We were literary prisoners, sweating, reading classics, and hanging out at the pool. If you want to find out how membership in a book club can end up with a person being dead, you can probably look us up under mother-daughter literary catastrophe. Or open this book and read my essay, which I'll turn in when I go back to school.

I really don't like writing negative reviews, but unfortunately, The Unbearable Book Club For Unsinkable Girls deserves one. The idea of this book sounded really interesting, so I was excited when I received it. Unfortunately, it fell flat. The characters were very lackluster and the plot did not have enough action. I felt the characters were really dull. A lot of the side characters, such as C.C (the popular girl), Jill (the jock), and Wallace(um..she was just weird) did not really develop that much throughout the story. The main character, Alyssa, definitely improved as a character throughout the story, but she had very few likable qualities in her personality. I could not identify or relate to any of the characters.

The plot also moved pretty slowly. I kept waiting for something really exciting to happen, although it never did. There were some ideas introduced at the beginning of the story that could have helped the plot be a lot better and more exciting, but the author never touched much on those ideas.

The one redeeming quality this book had was a nice writing style. The story was told from an interesting perspective and the references to some classic literature were pretty cool. Unfortunately, that did not make this book worth reading. I would not recommend it and I give it 2 out of 5 flowers. Thank you so much to Random House Publishing and Netgalley for letting me read a copy of this book for review!